Autor:    Julián Silva Puentes

OLD SON OF A BITCH

We lived for 5 years in a building next to the Javeriana, Piloto and Católica universities. Most of the tenants were students under the age of 30 who were on the balcony with their vapers, listening to reggaeton or electronic music.

They would hang out there, on their balconies, in the early hours of a Monday or Friday or any day of the week, so that the smoke (when they were not using a vape) would not enter the apartment. I could hear everything they said. They talked about a friend or an ex-boyfriend in the way of twenties. Girls are all “easy” and boys are all “dogs”. That was the general consensus of the balcony people. Suddenly a song of spite was playing, and they turned up the volume on the music. Then they would scream as if a tragedy was taking place and cry. Then they laughed. And in the end, regardless of the level of pain they expressed with their bellows, they toasted the health of “that bastard”.

Diana didn´t go crazy like I did, because most of the time she could sleep. A laugh from the neighbor´s balcony was enough for me to lose sleep. So, if it was 9:01 pm, I would call the reception to tell the guard the article in the horizontal property manual that prohibited parties after that hour. I would wait a few minutes for the intercom to ring in the apartment next door and then they would turn the music down. Then I would hear someone yell at me: “You old son of a bitch!”.

I should have laughed, but the truth is that I felt bad. I remembered when I was that age and I would throw dirt from the bushes at the windows of those who complained about the noise. You always know who is the one who calls the reception. The guards give you away. I also gives himself away when I am the only one in a whole building who is over 30 years old.

The thing about the land of the bushes happened 20 years ago. 20 years ago, I didn´t get so tired. 20 years ago, I was studying, and I got very drunk, because I didn´t study too much. I drank more than I studied and that was the good thing about college. Now I live tired. I get tired because I work from Monday to Friday. It is also tiring to go to the operations on Saturday night. Reading on the Transmilenio is very tiring, because you don´t have time to read elsewhere. Fortunately, the two-hour commute helps you finish a 500-page novel in a week. Standing, hanging from the bus handles and envying the person who managed to take a seat, you read because you have nothing else to do for two hours, and also because the best way you found to get off the heavy wheel of life is precisely with the story that someone else invented for you.

Today we live in an apartment surrounded by “old sons of bitches”, who complain about the music no matter what time it is. I´m happy! If we arrive on Friday and we´re not so tired, we make margaritas and order food. From 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, we drink and at 9:00 pm, we are falling asleep, because we can´t hold the drink. With two margaritas we are on fire and at the eighth, after downing our tequila stocking, we are left to pee in our pants.

It´s very nice and practical to be so bad at drinking. Not to say cheap. Not much is enough for us to fall asleep at the table after singing and dancing, because drinking in the apartment is better than doing it in a bar with the fear that a taxi driver will mug you on the way home.

The great writer Ernesto Sábato, author of “Sobre héroes y tumbas” and “El túnel”, published a book in the year 2000, at the age of 90, entitled “La resistencia”. In “La Resistencia” he talks about the advent of technology, the age of television and the eventual dehumanization of the procedures that govern world economies.

In the year 2000 I was barely 20 years old. I remember reading the first pages of “La Resistencia” and thinking “Old son of a bitch”. I said it by acting as devil´s advocate on behalf of television. For me, television has been like a second home. No matter where I am, the first thing I do when I get home is turn on the television.

I am a creature of television. I was raised by it. Shaped by it. All my cultural references are associated with a movie, with a series. Ernesto Sábato spoke against television and that is why I did not reach the third page of the book. That´s why I called him “Old son of a bitch”.

Ernesto Sábato must have been the world´s greatest “Old son of a bitch”, because he died at almost 100 years of age. He had to be too because he was a great writer. He was also a physicist (he earned a doctorate in physical sciences and mathematics, worked in the Curie laboratory in Paris, and taught at MIT in the United States). He was a painter and sculptor. He was an essayist. He obtained the Miguel de Cervantes prize in 1984.

I can imagine Ernesto Sábato calling the reception of his building telling the guard that “decent people work”, something that I said with resentment for that youth that I do not understand and against which I resist. Because my resistance goes beyond a noisy neighbor. My resistance goes against the collective vision of a world that understands its environment only through cell phone screens and the false reality that is hidden behind them. I rebel against the uniformity of thought, the bioproduct of efficiency and speed that we have become.

It is no longer technology that imitates man, but man imitates technology. We are the creators of the tools whose purpose is to make our lives easier. The idea of Frankenstein, the monster that rebels against his creator when he finds himself misunderstood, beaten and finds no other way to understand the meaninglessness of his life, is a fallacy in this new era. In this new era, Frankenstein is God, and we, his creators, become the cripple who serves him, the evil, stupid hunchback in charge of pulling levers and pushing trays, the assistant, as expendable and replaceable as any tool in the laboratory where the abomination of nature was created.

Ernesto Sábato wrote “La resistencia” when he was 90 years old. I´m not 42 and I feel like a 90-year-old yelling out the window for them to “turn off that singsong”. It is the idea that I am making of myself, and the truth is that I love it. I feel like a recovering alcoholic who judges people who drink. I feel with the moral wingspan to tell people how they should live their lives. I like that kind of power that nobody has given me, because it gives me the excuse to demand that the world think like me. Why? Because I´m older and wiser! Because I may not be Sábato´s age, but I wear a robe in the apartment, and I look out the window disheveled and with a cup of coffee in my hand yelling “let us rest!”. Also, because I prefer to mind my own business without comparing my life to the photos someone I don´t know, that posts doing whatever it is that people do who would rather take pictures of a sunset than appreciate it with nothing between them and eyes and the reality of the experience.

I know how insane all this sounds right now that I´ve just looked at my cell phone for the twentieth time in the last hour, because my boss can write at any time asking for some urgent trifle. But that´s how we “old bastards” are: impatient, irascible and apart from everything, proud. We like to talk about when there was no internet and we miss the clatter of a typewriter, despite how awkward and impractical it is to carry one everywhere. We yell at the computer because it shuts down, and it infuriates us to see people on the Transmilenio with their cell phones glued to their faces listening to things at full volume. What does it matter to me that the mistress of the former president of Peru sings him a ridiculous titled “Mi bebito fiu fiu”, with an Eminem song in the background? Is it really so interesting that a reggaeton singer says of another that his music is the worst thing that has happened to Latin America since Pablo Escobar? Or maybe some guy from college I barely spoke to finished his master´s degree in business law. Seriously, who cares about a European vacation of an actress who starred in a Colombian soap opera in 1999?

There are too many things to see, hear and experience in the transience of this life that doesn´t care how much profit we were able to get from it. Because life passes and things disappear with it. Buildings collapse due to the harsh elements. The cars suddenly stop and turn into scrap metal. And people are always going from one place to another with a very serious urgency without getting anywhere, and when we finally stop to catch our breath, we become witnesses of someone else´s life. We study photographs, videos and four-line messages so empty and innocuous that they go “viral”, because they save us 10 seconds of life that can be spent investigating what someone we have never seen ate for lunch.

The emptiness of the world is what makes me a quintessential “Old Bastard” who talks about old-fashioned songs and books that no one reads. I also like to say “every time in the past was better”, because I really romanticize a world in which people had to invent things to combat boredom. The power of imagination was the order of the day. What else could we do when the power went out in the house?

Remember the days of electricity rationing? It was the year of 1992 and every day, after 6:00 pm by mandate of the national government, the energy companies of each city cut off the light service.

In my house we used to tell scary stories after dinner. We also read by candlelight. My mother and sisters played ladder and I drew. No cars were heard in the street. If it was raining and cold, we would melt marshmallows on the stove top. And we talked and talked until we got sleepy at about 10:00 pm. Then we said goodbye and had to face our own thoughts until we fell asleep. With no one to give us financial advice on the cell phone. Without a woman with a tattooed face to talk about her sex life while she puts on makeup. No unemployed TV presenters filming their children prancing around. Without hearing about the breakup of some influencer to whom this world gives too much without demanding anything, but really nothing at all, in return. No videos of cats scratching at their owners. No middle-aged actresses talking about her Only fans account as a happy career turnaround.

A few years ago, in the days of “everything in the past was better”, people who liked to find out about other people´s lives were also called “old sons of bitches”. There was always a gossipy old woman in every neighborhood. She would lean out of the huge windows of the manor houses and take note of everything she saw and heard.

That “Old motherfucker”, everyone hated her. To invade someone´s privacy and tell someone else about it was an unforgivable insult. We now invite people into our lives and give their opinions. We post the most intimate, most embarrassing events, and we hope you´ll congratulate us on it. In fact, the big brands pay good sums of money to those who publish the details of their life and have thousands of “old motherfuckers” commenting on it. We devour this material with the simple click of a tab and we take part in the drama of a person. From a family. From a love break.

It goes without saying that the “Old son of a bitch” that I pride myself on being, is totally different from the other, the old gossip who looks out on the balcony of his house. My class of Old, of which I speak in this writing, is on the verge of extinction. I am not referring to the fact of calling the reception to complain about the noise. That is a matter of logical coexistence without an expiration date. I mean the jerk of my style who complains because the world is not what he expected. That guy should be pitied, because his inability to deal with change is an existential problem. So be patient with the “Old son of a bitch” who surely lives in every family, and ignore him when he demands that you go out into the world and experience it all with your own eyes. Really, ignore that old man, because in 10 years these words will be as obsolete as kerosene lamps, the linotype, the telegraph, the fax, the printed books and the artists who used to tell very long stories with heavy, cumbersome and impossible to transport typewriters.